Byron Acohido

Pulitzer-winning journalist Byron V. Acohido is the founder and executive editor of The Last Watchdog on Privacy & Security. Acohido is a respected cybersecurity influencer, and LW is widely considered to be one of the top cybersecurity websites.

Acohido first began paying close attention to cybersecurity and privacy in 2000, when he joined the Money section of USA TODAY to cover Microsoft. He conceived and delivered a nationally-recognized body of work for USAT, chronicling the frenetic emergence of cybercrime in its formative stages. He is the lead author of Zero Day Threat: The Shocking Truth of How Banks And Credit Bureaus Help Cyber Crooks Steal Your Money and Identity, a non-fiction thriller that received the 2009 NYSSCPA Excellence in Financial Journalism Award for general audience books. Acohido’s cogent articles, podcasts and videos are the gold-standard for smart coverage of complex privacy and security issues distilled for an intelligent audience.

While at the Seattle Times earlier in his career, Acohido was awarded the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting and 11 other national awards for investigative stories linking a dangerous defect in the rudder controls of Boeing 737 jetliners to a string of crashes that killed hundreds of people.

A native of the 50th state of Hawaii, Acohido is a graduate of Damien Memorial High School in Honolulu and the University of Oregon School of Journalism in Eugene, Ore. He resides on Puget Sound in the picturesque hamlet of Kingston, Wash., where his avocations revolve around ocean sports and playing the ukulele. As a cybersecurity influencer, Acohido is dedicated to fostering awareness to help make our Internet-centric economy as secure as it ought to be.